Abstract

Arguably, the administration of the law relies on the ability of people with legal training (judges) or without it (e.g., jurors) to fairly judge the misconduct of others. Whether metaphors of embodied cognition can be added to the many sources of bias that can distort human judgment in a court of law is a matter of contention. To this end, the main aim of the present study was to examine the impact of the purity metaphor (the conceptual equivalence of moral and physical purity), and of the taste metaphor (the conceptual equivalence of sensory and dispositional sweetness) on judgment of misconduct in individuals whose daily religious rituals and cultural habits are reminders of such equivalences. The ancillary aim was to assess the contribution of individual differences in guilt and shame proneness to judgment of misconduct relative to the transitory impact of embodied cognition metaphors. Participants read a story of a misdeed (i.e., cheating on a test) contemplated or committed by characters with whom they could identify. In the story, one character was internally conflicted, whereas the other was not. Prior to their being asked to judge each character’s actions, participants cleaned their hands with a wipe or tasted a candy (priming). Wiping one’s hands, which was assumed to activate the purity metaphor, and eating a candy, which was assumed to activate the taste metaphor, had opposite effects on the judgment of the conflicted character’s misdeed. For the non-conflicted character, individual differences in guilt and shame proneness, but not priming, predicted judgment. Applications exist for the finding that the influence of dispositions and transitory situational factors is modulated by the extent to which the materials to be judged engender uncertainty.